Thread: UK has surpassed the 100k deaths mark on most measures. It’s another one of those miserable milestones everyone hoped we wouldn’t hit.
No datapoint can tell the stories of loss across the country, but the numbers do at the very least provide a sense of perspective:

First off, here’s where the death toll is on the basis of various different yardsticks. The govt dashboard number has just passed 100k but on the basis of the @ONS measure of #COVID19 deaths we passed 100k on Jan 7.
Excess deaths still somewhat below (on basis of published data)

Why the differences? Well the dashboard measure probably understates the mortality toll from last spring. After all it’s based on test results and we weren’t testing much then. Hence why the black ONS line in this chart is prob a fairer reflection of where we were:

Still: 100k deaths is a horrible number, esp given that early on in the pandemic we were told that we would only face fatalities in that order if things went really badly. Well, they did. This has already been worse than any pandemic since the Spanish flu.

If you want other yardsticks on how this compares historically, here’s a thread and video I did on it the other week.
When we first started running these numbers I was expecting them to be really bad. In the event they were even worse than I expected. https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1348937282045308930?s=20

How does UK compare internationally? Well in this, as with the rest of these yardsticks it’s worth underlining that it will take some time before we know for sure. The death tolls are still mounting. But here are the five countries with the highest COVID death tolls (per 100k)

And when you look at the countries with the lowest deaths per 100k you see that it needn’t have gone this way.
In many countries facing #COVID19 the death tolls have been v small: China (tho there are legitimate question marks abt the numbers) but also Thailand, Vietnam & Taiwan.

However, these comparisons are reliant on govt data and in many countries that data is unreliable. A better yardstick is excess deaths (eg total deaths vs avg levels).
Here the UK is among the worst in the world. But below Belgium, Spain, Russia and some S American countries.